Simplify with integrity
As long as one of those can be the a junk drawer, I’m good. (Image by House Isabella)
A few years ago, I had a friend come to help tidy things up around the school.
Unfortunately, one of her key tactics — throwing things away — caused me some dismay. She tossed things that didn't have any meaning to her or weren't immediately useful, like a lamp base without a lampshade or a photograph of a child she didn’t know.
Saving too many things leads to cluttered spaces, but there is a difference between carefully assessing what should be kept and just chucking stuff indiscriminately. The choosing takes time and care, and delegating it doesn't work.
Though I struggle to part with physical objects, I love to keep systems and processes as lean and clean as possible. But before we simplify, we need to see everything we have. Otherwise, we simplify without integrity.
For example, suppose we're decluttering a closet. We may be tempted to throw out this or that glove or shoe. However, its mate might be in there somewhere, and we don't know yet. How sad would it be to toss a lone sock only to end up with another lone sock after further digging?
This is most relevant when it comes not just to the odds and ends in the physical realm of life, but also with respect to the routines we have and the procedures we carry out. We can't cut steps from a sequence until we know what they all are (and maybe why we have them). We can't eliminate redundancies until we're sure that they're actually redundancies.
A few months back, the students of a particular Atlanta-based homeschool program showed up and there was nobody there. In a series of decisions, the number of adults scheduled to be present on campus first thing in the morning was cut from two to one, the earliest drop-off time was moved from 8:00 to 8:30, and a turn-based duty schedule was established.
Thus, all it took was one person getting confused about which day she was to come in, and there were no grownups present when the students arrived on a particular Tuesday. The problem was solved within ten minutes, but a certain educator watching from a thousand miles away was pretty steamed about the situation.
Of course mistakes happen. Better to expect the mistakes and build them into the plan than to create a plan that only works if no one makes a mistake.
When we simplify with integrity, we keep everything that we need. We're not going for simple for the sake of simple — we make sure that all of the necessary pieces and parts are accounted for and accommodated. At that point, we can be confident in letting things go.
We certainly don't have to keep everything, and maybe we're willing to face the consequences of getting rid of stuff even if we might need it. But we never have to be ruthless. We want things to be simple, not oversimplified. If we strip away too many layers, we could be left with nothing.
Seth Godin spoke on his podcast about keeping slack in a system. Dan Andrews and Ian Schoen talk about margin. Meanwhile, my husband prefers to travel so light that he forgoes essentials like a toothbrush or a change of clothes. We get to calibrate to precisely the level of simplicity and efficiency we want.
Looking over, say, the budget for the summer camps at Eclectic Music, I’m tempted to try to simplify — to cut costs and increase efficiency by crossing out some line items. But I can only do that if I really understand why each of those expenses was there in the first place. Otherwise, I'm dropping someone else's family pictures in the trash, or getting rid of one shoe just because I can't find the other one. And then I may get a call saying the door's locked and no one can get in.
So, although I aspire to simplicity and the potential elegance it brings, I must temper it with integrity. If that leads to clutter sometimes, I can live with that. Better a bit of clutter than no toothbrush, I say. What about you?